Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Editorial symbols used in manuscript and published notebooks
- Introduction
- 1 Dreaming in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- 2 Dramatic dreaming spaces
- 3 The language of dreams
- 4 Genera and species of dreams
- 5 ‘Nightmairs’
- 6 The mysterious problem of dreams
- 7 Translations of dream and body
- 8 The dreaming medical imagination
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
1 - Dreaming in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Editorial symbols used in manuscript and published notebooks
- Introduction
- 1 Dreaming in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- 2 Dramatic dreaming spaces
- 3 The language of dreams
- 4 Genera and species of dreams
- 5 ‘Nightmairs’
- 6 The mysterious problem of dreams
- 7 Translations of dream and body
- 8 The dreaming medical imagination
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Summary
Dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off our waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of time,
And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past, – they speak
Like Sibyls of the future: they have power –
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not – what they will,
… What are they
Creations of the mind?
This questioning opening to Byron's ‘The Dream’, written in 1816, succinctly touches upon many of the fundamental and often contradictory opinions on the nature of dreams and dreaming during the Romantic period. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was no consensus on the origin and meaning of dreams. Some argued that they were miraculous, potentially divine events. Many believed that dreams revealed the powers of the imagination and that dreaming was a form of poetic inspiration. Others argued that they were entirely attributable to the dreamer's physical or psychological constitution. In seeking to formulate his own answers, Coleridge turned to the writings of antiquity as well as those of his contemporaries. From ancient writers he gleaned the notion that dreams have the potential for prophecy and can ‘speak like Sibyls of the future’. In the works of some of his contemporaries he encountered the theory that dreams are caused by spirits taking possession of the dreamer for short periods during sleep.
- Type
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- Information
- Coleridge on DreamingRomanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination, pp. 9 - 32Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997